Songbook: For All We Know
For all we know, we may never meet again. So goes the 1934 song, a classic love song, at first glance. But like many compositions of that era, if you listen to it again, if you return to it in passing years, its meaning world grows larger. Return to it now. The lyrics conjure life's other last times. Last time we made it back home. Last time we saw a friend or family member alive.
Before you go, make this moment sweet again. We each have so many last times. Here is one of mine. I have just passed through the security point at a small, regional airport in the mountains of North Carolina. Before I head to the gate, I turn for a final look at my father. There he is, at a distance now, barred by passport control and metal scanners, facing me and waiting to be certain I am gone. But he cannot be certain I am gone because he has lost his vision almost entirely. I am beyond his range, a blur among blurs at best. This waiting is an act of generosity. Pretending to me that he can see me, although we both know he cannot. He is carefully figuring how long to stand there, tall and loving. We have done this many times, and he never gets it wrong. That is how I know that when I turn to look for my dad before heading to the gate, he will be there.
But I lie. That was not the last time I saw my aging father. To tell the truth, the last time I saw him, he was on life support in an intensive care unit. Already lost to us. When they took him off life support, we held him and talked to him for his remaining minutes. We won't say goodnight until the last minute. I'll hold out my hand, and my heart will be in it.
By placing my dad back at the airport, I am rewriting our ending, telling myself stories. There he is, breathing on his own, thinking and talking, warm-blooded. In retrospect, I know he was a little diminished at each leave-taking. It was a gradual foreshadowing of our factual last parting. I can see it now, even in the stories I tell myself. Somewhere in my mind, biding their time, mostly suppressed, the questions were there. How long do we have? How many visits?
In truth, the world endlessly re-enacts that other classic song - every time we say goodbye, I die a little. Often, when we part from our deeply loved people, there is a glimmer of death, as if we are in rehearsal for the Big Parting. We hold the person too long and hard, or struggle for some imagined ‘right’ words. In early childhood, I could not sleep peacefully unless my last words to my parents were: goodnight, see you in the morning, I love you. In that order. Rehearsed but imperative. If not spoken last and correctly, surely something bad would come in the night. Those airport farewells, in adulthood, re-enacted the magical thinking of childhood. Because, after all, this could be the last one. By adulthood, we have learned that time and events, sooner or later, will intervene. Accidents. Arguments. Ruptures. Illnesses. Cells age and mutate. Breaths become shallow. Hearts begin to skip beats. We die a little every day.
I tell this story not to burden the reader with my memories or with sad forebodings, but because one person's story always takes us to our own. I hope that somewhere during the telling of mine, your thoughts wandered to your important partings, whether they occurred around the corner from where you live, in the next room, or an ocean away. That we hold a deep attachment to particular people and that there will come a last time – these are universal. I hope you find your story. I hope you think it, dream it, tell it, write it in whatever ways brings solace.
Tomorrow was made for some, tomorrow may never come. But there is another reason for these small musings about a song, one drawn from the heightened level of violence unfolding before our eyes every day. We turn our minds to people who cannot go home because home is unsafe or has been destroyed. Refugees who never wanted to leave, and may not have the gift of counting last times, cherishing the tiny differences in each reunion and each parting. They have knowingly entered into a parting that may never be reversed.
We consider, too, the unanticipated last times associated with extreme events. A loved one leaves for work in the morning and doesn't come home. An untimely and unanticipated loss has occurred, and so now, we confront a last time for which we are utterly unprepared. Read about any disaster, road accident, sudden death, act of violence, terror, or wartime experience. Consider – in this perilous moment - the ICE roundups and forced family separations now occurring every day across the U.S. People are being disappeared.
In verb tenses that collide and overtake one another, the survivors may say something along these lines: I saw her that morning, but I never guessed that was to be our last time. If only I had known, I would have told her how much I... In such events, we forever view our lives as a broken narrative, a before-and-after. There is a rupture in our timelines. Our longing to go back to the land of before is so urgent and helpless that language itself fractures under the strain.
Consider the question of how we mediate and memorialize our last times. There is memory - comforting, painful, simultaneously true and unreliable. There are photographs, recorded messages, and personal items retrieved or left behind. I keep my mother's half-empty perfume bottle, its contents now cloudy after twenty years, in the vain hope that there may never be a last time of catching the scent of her.
Ask refugees what they have held close when the choice of what to carry is so limited. We now understand, for example, the importance of the smartphone. Its many uses include the storing of photographs, text messages, perhaps seconds of video of loved ones now dead or left behind. Hala, a refugee from Aleppo, holds up her phone and says, "See why this phone is so dear? It has everything. All my family, all my world is here. That's why I'm always holding it."
Think now about the growing use of smartphones to record the actions of ICE, the moment of detention, and community warnings and resistance. Here, the smartphone speaks for the disappeared. The smartphone serves as a crucial tool in the hands of eyewitnesses who may otherwise go unheard. For the thousands who view these recordings online, we pause to remember that we are witnessing the life-altering experience of a stranger, one whose own loved ones may not yet know he is gone. It is for us to demonstrate compassion and anger. But for the loved ones, whether they are present or not, the violence of the disappearance turns the last time into a layered experience. There is the private contact with the disappeared one, perhaps at breakfast that morning, ordinary and untroubled. But now there is this other last time, a public, brutal, and haunting presence on social media, shared with the world in the hope of bringing social change.
For those of us lucky enough to face the more anticipated losses of life – painful as they are - I hope the old song is helpful. Because it’s true: we come and we go, like the ripples of a stream. In the meantime, when we brush against a stranger at an airport, on a street corner, or in some other public place, we can be kind. We can help where help is needed, and stand with the strangers around us. Make friends and family of strangers because they may have lost someone only hours or days before, by death or disappearance. Either way, it is their last time. We know a thing or two about last times. And for all we know, we may never meet them again.
For All We Know (J.Fred Coots and Sam M. Lewis, 1934)
Here is the rendition of the song at Justice Comes Alive, a virtual festival drawing upon the power of music to bring about collective change in response to racial inequality. (2020)
Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye (Cole Porter, 1944)
Perfect.
Beautiful Amy.❤️